The initiative has been backed by a $20 million investment from the federal government, and aims to divert more than 14,000 tonnes of waste from landfill each year.
“This will be the biggest and the largest single-minded recycling facility in Australia,” Peter Gregg from Recycling Plastics Australia said.
Since REDcycle’s collapse in 2022, most soft plastic has ended up as landfill, but the new facility will clean and purify shopping bags, chip packets and food wrappers and transform them into packaging.
“This is the beginning of the missing part of the puzzle,” Acting Premier Susan Close said.
“We have people who have soft plastic and want to recycle it and increasingly there’s a hungry market that wants to take that material and turn it into packaging.”
The new facility in Kilburn is part of a broader national effort to increase recycling capacity by over a million tonnes annually, creating more than 3000 jobs across the country, including more than 600 in South Australia.
The site is expected to be operational within 12 months.